Dixie Victorious: An Alternate history of the Civil War

by Peter Tsouras

  A further 11,000 reinforcements were sent as soon as the Trent crisis erupted. Florence Nightingale personally advised the Government on warm clothing needed for the Canadian winter. Only one transport managed to sail up the St Lawrence before it froze, obliging the rest to use the Atlantic port of Halifax in Nova Scotia. The troops then went overland on sledges, heading north along a snow road via Fredericton, Grand Falls and Edmundston to Rivière-du-Loup on the St Lawrence, the terminus of the Grand Trunk Railway to Quebec and Montreal.

  The snow road lay immediately across the border from the state of Maine, but the Union lacked enough troops in position to cut it at the start of hostilities. The American border town of Houlton, for example, contained only a handful of volunteers. Units raised in Maine had been sent south to join the Union armies and those troops left in the state were more concerned about restoring the defences of the principal towns and harbors against the threat posed by the Royal Navy. Moreover, a major attack into New Brunswick would have been logistically difficult given Maine’s poorly-developed rail network and sparse population near the border.

  The Governor-General of British North America was the capable Viscount Monck. He knew that the North would not be able to attack in strength before spring 1862, for both climatic and organizational reasons, and by then he would have 18,000 British regulars. Monck accelerated defensive preparations and called out the militia, although he was conscious of its limited value in a pitched battle. The sedentary militia had hitherto existed only on paper and lacked training and equipment. The active militia, or volunteers, were not much better. Ralph Vansittart, a local politician, described how on December 25, 1861, a new company of volunteers from the Middlesex Sedentary Militia was mustered at the village of Glammis amid great enthusiasm:

  “The appearance of the new recruits would not give much satisfaction to a regular army officer, but the rough material is there, out of which sturdy troops can be made fit for any work… Colonel [John] Axford was supreme. Dressed in the old uniform he wore in 1837, consisting of a long-tailed blue coat, with brass buttons, and gilt-cord shoulder straps, a pair of white duck trousers tucked into his high cavalry boots; while a shako and a pair of spurs completed his attire… His appearance was to me anything but dignified, but to his troops he was the personification of military dignity and glory. His popularity was not diminished by the production of two kegs of whisky, which, so long as they lasted, were free to all. After the rolls had been completed and the men sworn in, they were drawn up, and an effort made to dress them in line, and here the democratic relationship between the officers and men was at once exemplified. It was, Bob, won’t you move up to Tom; Jim, please step forward; or, Now, men, why don’t you hold on and let the others come up. And when finally the order to march was given, and the line was halted, after an attempt to wheel with the left as a pivot, the whole formation was found as zigzag as a snake fence.”6

  Monck, in view of the vast disparity in numbers of troops and resources, could not hope to take the offensive. He would have to defend his territories as best he could until the Union was forced to negotiate by defeats on its other fronts. The rout of the Union Army by the Confederates at Bull Run on July 21, 1861, had not impressed British observers with an undue sense of the martial prowess of the Union troops or the ability of their commanders. They were seen as no match for British regulars.

  Monck’s confidence was further boosted by the fact that he had agents in the states of Maine and New York to obtain intelligence of impending moves. A serious invasion of so vast a territory as British North America would require a minimum of 50,000 troops and could not be prepared in secret. A large number of British North Americans had previously joined the Union Army and many now deserted in case they were ordered to invade their homeland. They provided useful information as well as additional numbers of trained troops.

  Britannia Rules the Waves!

  The Royal Navy’s prestige was immense and recent reforms had increased its professionalism. Immediately on the outbreak of war, its squadrons around the world began clearing the Union merchant marine from the oceans. The Royal Navy at the end of 1861 had 339 ships worldwide, while the Union Navy had about 264, many of them converted commercial vessels rather than purpose-built warships.7

  The most active share of the Royal Navy’s operations fell to the North American and West Indies Squadron under Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Milne. This was based at Bermuda between November and May and at Halifax for the rest of the year. Milne was heavily reinforced in 1861 and again on the outbreak of war. His vessels had both steam-power and sails, whereas many of the Union ships had formerly been merchantmen, relied exclusively on sails and had inexperienced crews. Milne could also count on support from the strong French naval forces in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

  As soon as hostilities broke out, Milne attacked the Union squadrons that were blockading the Confederacy’s harbors, in the hope of destroying them before they could unite, scatter or take refuge in ports. Milne swept the Atlantic Seaboard, while a detached squadron under Commodore Dunlop cleared the Gulf of Mexico. The Royal Navy experienced problems with some of its guns, particularly the new breech-loading rifled Armstrongs. These had superior range and accuracy, but also suffered from design defects that made them prone to accidents. Some British and French ships were severely damaged, but generally the actions swung decisively in the allies’ favor. In the most famous of these naval battles, Commodore Dunlop forced Flag Officer David G. Farragut to surrender after crushing his West Gulf Blockading Squadron off New Orleans and reducing his flagship, the U.S.S. Hartford, to a wreck.

  Some of the surviving Union ships managed to return to port, while others scattered and began raiding allied commerce around the world. The Bay of Bengal on the trade route to India provided particularly rich pickings, but the most spectacular raids occurred around the British Isles. The U.S.S. Kearsarge under Captain Charles W. Pickering even attacked the harbor of Leith near Edinburgh, thus emulating John Paul Jones, the great American naval hero who had cruised round Britain during the War of Independence (1775–83), attacking commerce and raiding coastal towns. But Pickering’s audacious attack on merchant shipping near the Isle of Wight led to disaster when his ship was sunk by the Royal Navy’s powerful new ironclad, H.M.S. Warrior. He was plucked from the sea by the royal yacht Osborne and promptly invited to dine with Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales. The 20-year-old prince was returning from an immensely successful state visit to Paris, where he had completely won over the French people with his charm and good humor.

  Milne established a blockade of the entire Union eastern coast using five squadrons, a total of 54 ships. To maintain the blockade, he used bases and coaling stations in British North America, Bermuda, the West Indies and the Confederacy. The Admiralty had stockpiled large quantities of the superb Welsh anthracite in Halifax, Bermuda and the West Indies before the outbreak of war. Milne also occupied Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts as a base for his colliers as they ferried coal to the blockading ships.

  Milne had been acutely conscious of the vulnerability of his main bases at Halifax and Bermuda, both of which were lightly fortified. He wrote on December 31, 1861:

  “If Bermuda were in the hands of any other nation, the base of our operations would be removed to the two extremes, Halifax and Jamaica, and the loss of this island as a Naval Establishment would be a National misfortune.”8

  Fortunately, the Union had missed its chance to launch a powerful attack on Milne’s bases before its squadrons were scattered. This lost opportunity resulted largely from the alarm and defensive-mindedness that pervaded Lincoln’s Cabinet. Lincoln’s men remembered how, in the War of 1812–14, the British had established a blockade that had devastated the American economy and they had also launched a series of raids along the coast, during one of which they had even burned the city of Washington. Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, was aghast at the prospect of another war with Britain and told a
Cabinet meeting in January 1862:

  “The British will change the whole course of the war; they will destroy seriatim [one after the other] every naval vessel; they will lay all the cities on the seaboard under contribution… I will notify the governors and municipal authorities in the North to take instant measures to protect their harbors. I have no doubt that the enemy are at this minute on their way to Washington, and it is not unlikely that we shall have a shell or a cannon ball from one of their guns in the White House before we leave the room.”9

  Tens of thousands of Union troops were tied down in building and manning static defences on the Atlantic coast. Old ships were collected ready to be sunk across the channel of the Potomac to prevent warships sailing up it to bombard the capital.

  Milne’s blockade would not be watertight unless he could actually seize or destroy the Union ports. But he was reluctant to risk attacks against strongly-defended targets and recoiled from the idea of an indiscriminate bombardment of cities. The destruction of the main Union ports would in fact have harmed Britain as well as the North after the war given the volume of Britain’s transatlantic trade. Milne was also against attacking the coast of Maine, despite its many tempting targets, as he wrongly believed that the state might secede from the Union, as it had nearly done during the War of 1812–14.

  A report by the Royal Navy’s hydrographer, Captain John Washington, completed in December 1861, indicated that New York City was strongly fortified and cast doubt on whether it could be attacked successfully, except by using well-protected ironclads to distract the defences while wooden ships slipped past to bombard the port.10 But Milne had no ironclads with his squadron and had not yet been reinforced with the floating ironclad batteries that had proved so successful against Russian fortifications during the Crimean War. Similar doubts were voiced on the feasibility of attacking Boston.

  Ironclad developments had been led by the French and British. In America, the Confederates had begun to rebuild the Merrimack as the ironclad C.S.S. Virginia, which was variously dubbed “that thing” and “the roof of a barn with a huge chimney.” The North’s response had been to begin the construction at New York City of a powerful coastal ironclad with a gun turret and an alarmingly low, flat deck. It was called the U.S.S. Monitor and was also referred to, less formally, as “a cheese box on a raft.”

  Since New York was blockaded, the Monitor was unable to go through any sea trials before her first sortie on February 28, 1862. She experienced serious problems with steering and had to be towed back into New York harbor after sinking a British vessel. By the time she could be fitted with a new steering gear and engine valves, a fortnight had elapsed and the blockading force was prepared to evade another sortie.

  The intervention of the Monitor gave the Royal Navy an unpleasant shock, particularly after it became clear that the Union was building a fleet of sister ships. Fortunately, the monitors were unseaworthy and were therefore limited to coastal defence. The British Admiralty admitted that the Federals were now “practically unassailable in their own waters,” but had no great worries about the wider capabilities of the Union ironclads:

  “The few that seem likely to possess sea going qualities are in no way superior to the French ‘Gloire’ or ‘Invincible’… The greater number are mere rafts carrying very few heavy guns propelled at moderate speed, and though perfectly well adapted for the Inland Waters of that great Continent, and most formidable as Harbour Defences, are not in any sense sea going ships of War.”11

  Thus the blockade of the Union was maintained. Small craft provided a trip-wire near the ports to help warships stationed offshore to intercept the ocean-going vessels while remaining outside the effective range of the monitors.

  Viscount Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, suggested reinforcing Milne with H.M.S. Warrior, but this massive ironclad had been intended for service in home waters and was in fact too long to be able to use any of the available ports on the other side of the Atlantic. Since she had been designed as a sea-going ship to defend Britain and her ocean trade, she could not in fact have closed with the Monitor given her deep draught and the shallowness of the coastal waters in which the Monitor had to operate. Debate on the likely result of a clash between the two vessels must therefore remain mere speculation. The Monitor’s inventor, Captain John Ericsson, had claimed in a letter to the Union’s Navy Board on September 3, 1861:

  “The iron-clad vessels of France and England are utterly unable to resist elongated shot fired from the 12-inch guns of the battery [Monitor]. The 4½-inch plates of La Gloire or the Warrior would crumble like brown paper under the force of such projectiles, and at close quarters every shot would crush in the enemy’s sides at the water-line. The opposing broadsides would be nothing more than the rattling of pebbles on our cylindrical iron turret.”12

  But such bombastic comments should not be accepted at face value. It was true that only the central sections of Warrior’s sides were armored and her rudder head was dangerously exposed. But the Monitor could fire only one shot every quarter of an hour. Furthermore, the Warrior’s speed, 14 knots, would have made her dangerous had she managed to ram the far slower Monitor. Such considerations must, however, remain hypothetical.

  The French ironclads, such as the Gloire and Magenta, were smaller than the Warrior, but had been designed for the Mediterranean rather than the stormier waters of the Atlantic and had limited sailpower. Hence the allies looked instead to the Confederacy to provide a local fleet of ironclads and floating ironclad batteries, using British money, materials and expertise. In due course, these Confederate ships reinforced the allied blockading squadrons and occasionally clashed with Union monitors, with mixed results. Later in the war, the Union produced mines, or “torpedoes” as they were known at the time, and even began to develop a submarine. Thus the war at sea continued to worry the allies until the end of the conflict.

  The Pacific Seaboard

  In contrast to the Atlantic Coast, the Union’s western seaboard remained highly vulnerable. Many locally-raised regiments had been sent to the eastern theatre of war and the troops left behind were unable to do much more than preserve law and order. Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Maitland of the Royal Navy’s Pacific Squadron soon destroyed the Union’s small Pacific Fleet and established a blockade. He also captured the Union commercial whaling fleet near Hawaii and occupied the islands as a base, hoping to develop Pearl Harbour, as it became known, into a major dockyard. For the time being, the British had no dry-dock facilities in the Pacific and before the war had actually sent ships for repair to San Francisco. This made it imperative to seize the city and bay of San Francisco immediately.

  Maitland, using British troops withdrawn from China, began a series of bombardments, raids and permanent landings along the Pacific Coast. On April 6, 1862, he attacked San Francisco, taking advantage of the morning fog to slip ships past the guns of Alcatraz and Fort Point and into the bay. The Navy Yard at Mare Island and the Arsenal at Benicia were quickly taken, being weakly-held. Parties of Royal Marines spearheaded the occupation of the city itself and seized large quantities of gold stored in its banks. The city’s occupation was therefore a major economic as well as strategic blow to the Union. It was followed by the surrender of the isolated and under-strength garrison of Alcatraz, where immense amounts of munitions had been stored.

  The two-year occupation of San Francisco was surprisingly peaceful. The British used the city’s most popular citizen, Joshua A. Norton, the self-appointed Emperor Norton I of the United States, in a remarkable campaign to win the inhabitants’ hearts and minds. Norton had been born in London in 1819 and came to San Francisco in 1849 from South Africa, but went bankrupt ten years later while trying to corner the local rice market. He then boldly assumed the title of Emperor of the United States and issued imperious decrees and even his own private currency to pay his bills. He quickly won over the people of San Francisco with his escapades and scrupulously maintained his neutrality following the secession
of the South by alternately wearing Union and Confederate uniforms, along with a plumed hat and a ceremonial sword. Soon after the British arrived, a sentry accidentally shot Lazarus, one of Norton’s two beloved mongrel dogs. Admiral Maitland was obliged to issue a formal apology to the grief-stricken Emperor and provided a guard of honor at the dog’s funeral. Norton was now regularly saluted by all British servicemen and was invited to dinner aboard Maitland’s flagship, H.M.S. Bacchante. He was greeted by a 21-gun salute and given the magnificent, scarlet, full-dress uniform of a captain of the Grenadier Guards. Norton was delighted and issued a decree, published in all the city newspapers, commanding his subjects to welcome the British occupiers as brothers. He also wrote, less successfully, to Queen Victoria and President Lincoln, ordering them to end hostilities and join him and other world leaders in forming a League of Nations to resolve such disputes peacefully.

  British forces had also taken the offensive further north, in the Pacific North-West, where the frontier had long been disputed. In particular, the Oregon Treaty of 1846 had failed to clarify the ownership of San Juan Island near Seattle. This had nearly resulted in a war in June 1859, when an American settler on the island shot a British pig trampling on his potatoes. When the British tried to bring the man to justice, the American commander of the Department of Oregon had sent a company of the U.S. 9th Infantry under Captain George E. Pickett, a future Confederate general. Both sides sent further reinforcements and Pickett later claimed that he had hoped the ludicrous dispute would lead to a war, as this could have united his increasingly-divided country against a foreign foe. As it was, the standoff was defused by an envoy from Washington, General Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers,” who arranged for each side to withdraw its reinforcements. A detachment of 100 Royal Marines was left at the northwestern end of the island, with an American camp 10 miles away at the other end.